WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-UpWelcome to the 81st edition of the WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-up! In this edition we're looking at popular "Open World" Farms, Tools of the Trade Data Collection and Pet Trading Opportunities!

My name is Gumdrops and I’m the lead moderator for the /r/woweconomy subreddit and the accompanying Discord server. I am also the Support/Community Manager & User Evangelist for TradeSkillMaster, the Auction House addon suite for World of Warcraft. I stream on Twitch for Method and my focus is on mentoring and tutoring the WoW community in all things gold-making. I hope to cover and showcase some of the interesting topics, discussions, content and guides that have been going on over the last week in the gold making community. Some that you might have missed as a veteran gold maker, or you might be interested in checking out for the first time as a new or aspiring ‘goblin’.

The format will not be that of a traditional guide, but links to further reading with commentary and opinions of my own. I will be looking at the bigger picture, the decision making and thought processes in being a gold maker – rather than a step by step instructional list. As the saying goes, “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”.

Open World Farms

You're looking to get in to gold-making, you don't have much money to invest but you have some time to spare and don't feel like committing too much time to learning addons and markets or higher level financial thinking. Maybe you want to catch up on a favourite TV show or netflix series while you make a little side income playing WoW. Farming might be ideal for you!

There are various types of farming, including solo and group farms, loot and material farms, or instanced and non-instanced farms which is what today's topic is about. When it comes to instanced farming, you're usually capped at how many instances you can enter per hour. Whether it's a dungeon or a raid, you can only enter 10 instances in a 60 minute window after zoning in to the first one. Quite often, some of the dungeons or raids you'd farm can be completed in a very short space of time meaning there'll be a point where you can no longer continue a farm that requires a zone 'reset' or move on to somewhere else.

"Open world" farms are named as such because you don't need to enter an instance to do the farm, they're often just a location in a specific expansion continent that has been proven to be ideal to acquire certain things because of high drop rates, faster respawn times or efficiency in farm routing. This could be for gathering materials with Herbalism or Mining, or it can be farming for other specific crafting reagents such as a Runa Oscura or Acqua Instabile or even BoE gear, mounts or toys. A cross-over here is the idea that these can be solo farms, i.e you can do them alone, or you can form a group of 5 (or more) to make certain farms more efficient while killing more mobs to be able to loot more mobs.

There are no pre-requisites to open world farms, no reputations, attunements or end-game gear which makes it very easily accessible to anyone looking to diversify or start gold-making. However, these kinds of gold-making strategies are probably the most server dependent when it comes to comparing or replicating results seen by other community goblins or content creators. 'Your mileage may vary' is truest for farming, as it will come down to both yourself in terms of how much time you are willing or wanting to put in to farming and your realm economy. You could spend X amount of time on Y realm to get Z gold, when someone else spends A amount of time on B realm and get C gold. All three parts of this equation are variable so understanding that when making plans or decisions on what to farm is important.

Question: What are your favorite open world farms from classic to current content that always seem to draw you back in?

​I would have to say that two old open world farms that are still to this day my favorite farms would be the Wetlands Draghetto Cremisi Piccino farm and the Burning Steppes. The variety of transmog , world drops and materials make these spots great for starting farmers and old alike trying to fill up the AH with items.

This kind of open world farm is probably the text-book example of a 'good farm'. It's done mostly for the Crimson Whelpling pet drop, but you get a lot of other things as you're farming such as materials and transmog. If you don't get the primary pet item you're still obtaining other items that have a value as you're going. /u/Yanrogue chipped in with some other spots to check out:

Eastern Kingdoms: Oozling for Melmina Disgustosa in Swamp of Sorrows, do this on a herbalist to get extra income, it is an easy circle route.

Piccolo Uovo farming outside of Silvermoon for the holiday spike, easy to do on low level toons to stock up on for christmas between queues.

Pandaria: Townlong steppe rares on an alt for the rare drops especially the Sacca Grande di Forniture Zandalari. Isle of giants- the warbringer on the boat. great for troll xmog, motes, pets, just great when not camped by others.

Draenor: Fur Trapping in Nagrand , the Sangue Selvaggio sell like hotcakes and super easy mindless farm for alts. Also the 3 crystal pets are near the wolves of this farm.

Outlands: Skettis, killing the Razziaforeste on a herbalist to herb them for motes and herbs. Also the Polvere d'Ombra sells for people doing the rep grind.

That's some of my outdoor non instance farms that I don't mind sharing.

Not only are some of these easily executed farms, but they're diverse across different expansion, item type and value. /u/Yanrogue even says that's only some of the farms they participate in!

Discussion PointWhat are some of your favourite open world farms? Do you prefer to farm solo or in a group? If you try any of the farms mentioned, leave a comment with your results!

Data Collection

It's been a couple of weeks now since the roll out of patch 8.1.5 and there has been a lot of discussion on how much value the profession Tools of the Trade bring to the table. This time we're going to look at the numbers specifically for Alchemy and Enchanting, which are still way ahead of the pack in terms of gold-making potential.

Make sure you have the crafting glove enchant (usually a few gold at most) Incantamento Guanti - Artigianato di Kul Tiras, to cut the crafting time down to 1 sec per. You can craft 100 or 10000 at a time, any excess get sent to your mail. Just have to move/turn your character every ~10 mins to keep from afk'ing out of the game. Get the Easy Scrap add on for scrapping, just have to hit 1 keybind every ~20 seconds.

Set up a mailing operation to send the blues to your enchanter to DE and the greens to your scrap toon so all you have to do with excess in mail is empty mail, hit one button to send blues/greens to specific toons and repeat until your mail is empty.

I had mats for 1,560 potions. In the first 10 minute window I got 783 pots. In the second 10 minute window I got 863 pots. In the third 10 minute window I got 823 pots

At the end I had mats for 163 more potions, but the expired. So according to my math I used the mats for 1397 potions and I got 2469! This equals 1.767 proc rate when having the buff as opposed to having 1.4-1.41 without it.

This is a pretty decent proc rate that could result in nice profits depending on your server economy. The whole process took exactly an hour, in which I basically had to click a button 6 times - 3 for getting the buff and 3 for clicking Craft all. I haven't checked the proc rate when crafting flasks, but I guess it would be the same. I decided to craft pots instead of flasks due to the fact that pots move faster than flasks, but you should have a higher profit margin if you craft flasks instead.

The number 1.75 has been banded around the community a bit, and I believe that's what most are using as a conservative proc rate for crafting with rank 3 and the tool of the trade buff. It may be 1.76 but we'd need a much larger sample size to refine the numbers to that degree. This confirms that it's quite essential to have both of this extra chances at procs in order to participate in the market competitively, as /u/Korzag explains:

I'm more an observer on this sub than a contributor, but I have noticed a decline in potion prices since tools of the trade came out. Last night picked up 40 int pots at about 160g each, when they typically sat around 400g before the item came out. Of course this is anecdotal, and I also bought the potions at a prime time (they're now back to up to around 250g each, and I expect they'll go higher as folks start raiding tonight).

The interesting thing to me is that on my server, Polline di Sirena is currently selling at 19.44g each, and Baccello Fluviale is at 17.94g each. Raw mats values these potions at 337.92g, and factoring in your findings of 1.767 proc rate, that values each potion around 191.24g So if pots are around 25g each right now, that gives each potion a 59g/potion profit. Probably the first time I've ran the numbers and actually seen alchemy being profitable.

I'm not exactly sure which numbers /u/Korzag is looking at here, whether it's minimum buyout or market value etc, but it's also worth keeping in mind that if you're not going for absolute volume and would rather not have to babysit your auctions with aggressive relisting - you can simply 'overcut' with different stack sizes on the Auction House. Your stack of 5 flasks or potions doesn't have to undercut the cheapest stack of 1, so you can charge a little bit more for those if the market allows for it and increase your margins slightly. This is a methodology I've explained many times, but it's such an easy concept and strategy that applies to crafted and farmed goods that can be sold in stacks that it's well worth repeating.

Discussion PointDo you have these two Tools of the Trade? If not, will you get them now that you have some more data behind them? How often do you restock your crafted auctions?

Pet Trading Opportunities

One of the great things about pets is that you can cage them up to your pet journal and log in to another completely different realm to un-cage it to sell on the Auction House or direct to other players. If you're struggling to sell your stock of pets on your home server, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from collecting them all up to go on an adventure and offer them for sale somewhere else. The next step for this is to start buying and selling pets between servers at a grander scale, identifying servers that you can obtain cheap popular or desirable pets and then identifying the servers you can sell them at a profit is an ultimate end-game for the pet trading goblin or gold-maker.

This is especially beneficial if your primary objective is just to make gold for WoW tokens or for Blizzard Balance, because it doesn't really matter where you gold is being made or where it is currently held on different servers. If you're not looking to funnel revenue in to primary raiding or end-game characters, pet trading might be ideal for you.

One of the questions that comes up a lot regarding pets, is whether it's worth leveling a pet to 25 before selling it. There was an opportunity this week to very easily level pets given the alignment of the Pet Battle bonus event and the Garrison daily pet quest that allowed for 2-battle leveling from 1-25, dubbed 'Super Squirt Day'. Trusted Goblin hikons prepared an evergreen video on how this works:

The next Super Squirt Day for US realms will be May 24th 2019, for the EU region there won't be another one for 6 months or more.

Super Squirt: The fastest team is 1:25 minutes. But this uses Widget, which can only be gotten on Halloween. Yes, Boneshard uses fewer turns but his animation is so long that it drags out the time.

Super Squirt is not the sole repeatable pet trainer. Every Family Familiar +1 trainer in Legion can also be used during Pet Week to hyper lvl pets. That has caused a dip in the market for lvl 25 pets. Every pet forum has this posted, That's why they take longer to sell. However! Blizzard nerfed ALL the BFA trainers recently so they can't anymore. It stands to reason they forgot That Other Expansion (again) and they'll nerf it soon enough.

Pet selling has suffered from Legion. Without Casuals getting easy gold, it's harder to flip pets for good profit. That and sites like this have increased competition. Consider your time spent vrs profit earned. Is spending all day lvling pets for 3k worth your time?

It used to be lvling vrs Squirt was decent character exp, I hear this was removed recently (unconfirmed). I can confirm Legion trainers give 2% per fight. (rested, 113, no heirlooms, no buffs)

You also need a crap ton of pet bandages to do this effectively outside the garrision.

​Personally, I sell lvl 25 pets. But, my reasons are as follows:

Most are acquired during Transmog runs, not low drop rares, they are just something I pick up

I am lazy about listing them and I'm not trying to make fast sales. I don't mind if they take longer to sell because I don't want to juggle with undercutters selling lvl 1 pets. Especially with the web AH removed.

I like lazily leveling an alt in my garrison Dalaran while watching Netflix via pet battles. Or I can run a few WoD/MoP trainers while cooking stuff. I can't walk away from a hyper farm, I can walk away from a pet trainer. But I do pay an opportunity price for that. It would probably be more lucrative to just farm islands really.

If I had a lot of duplicates, rares, fewer alts or more time to juggle the AH, I wouldn't bother.

These reasons line up with the play-style and preferences of /u/Vhalerun, what works for you and what you will enjoy may very well be different so applying your philosophies and mindset to this kind of question you can judge for yourself whether it makes sense for you.

Discussion PointDo you battle or trade pets? Have you ever traded cross-server to make more gold? What's your favourite personal pet?

Further Reading

Most of this information was discussed and originally posted on the /r/woweconomy subreddit or in the accompanying Discord server. You can also catch me streaming live on Twitch every Tuesday & Thursday answering gold making and TradeSkillMaster questions plus Saturdays from 7PM UK (2PM US Eastern) for the WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-up live on Wowhead.com, or you can tweet your feedback/thoughts via Twitter at @GumdropsEU

Commento di johnclever

on 2019-04-06T15:58:34-05:00

what you think about grinding rep on alts? from profession perspective. they giving us option to learn new proffesion and for 1k gold we can restore the old. but that doesnt restore the prelegion recipes. i dont see reason why the recipes should be locked behind multiple grinds for same faction.

Commento di gmfitzgerald

on 2019-04-06T17:45:10-05:00

Is it really worth it to make the Tools of the Trade item for Alchemy if I'm just some semi-casual making flasks for my family? Without the cauldrons giving free items any more, I'm looking at the 110 Anchor Weed required to make it and wondering if I'm really gonna break even any time soon.

Commento di Gumdrops

Commento di brudarek

on 2019-04-06T18:48:58-05:00

Can also use spectral tiger cub in place of widget, though widget is way cheaper to buy.

Commento di blissfire

on 2019-04-07T00:16:55-05:00

My favorite personal pet for battling is probably the Feline Familiar. She has Stoneskin, a Devour heal, and a magic basic attack that destroys flyers, and is pretty strong against almost anything else, even. If I need an in-combat sustain that isn't dependent on a kill, I like the Dream Whelplings.

Commento di vikn

on 2019-04-07T04:27:01-05:00

"But this uses Widget, which can only be gotten on Halloween"

Widget can be bought all year around on the auction house. Unlike pets like Verme Fantasma which can only be gotten during Halloween.

"I crafted 1,632 Tidespray Linen Bracers. Scrapped the green ones and DEd the blue ones. Unfortunately I did not record how many blues I got."

"Do you battle or trade pets? Have you ever traded cross-server to make more gold? What's your favourite personal pet?"

I both battle and sell pets, I find Miniserpe Volante Meccanica being a solid option to level up during Squirt day and then sell, especially during the Darkmoon fair. I've bought a couple of TCG pets on servers I don't play on, not to make gold but to save gold on my purchase. I'm very fond of Scopa Incantata not only does it looks great but it's extremely unique and useful in terms of it's abilities and pet family.

Commento di Thoorin

on 2019-04-08T07:09:11-05:00

So much to do so little time... I've slacked on my fav farm recently, but for the longest of time, waaay into Legion, I've been farming wolf cages in nagrand for fur. It was a delicious farm, at the peak I could farm monthly supply of cages in about an hour (this likely still holds true). Then, once a week, grab my bloods which were and are "super safe" produce - if they sell better on the AH, then good; if they don't you can always just convert them to red bags of gold at your garrison's trading post for roughly 50-60g cash. The fur would partly go to market when it still sold reasonably well when in volume, and partly to my tailor to be converted into mats for 30-slot bags. All the elementals produced in the course of that would go to my alchemist for transmute to earths (iirc), also to fuel bag production - and bags this size still sell reasonably well, though not at a premium anymore as there's a larger bag on the market.

Alas, at one point, new content options (first OH tables, and now current content) have exceeded that farm in profitability, so I don't bother anymore.

And pets... yea. I bought pets on a huge realm where prices go down fast, and I farmed or bought them on my remote, mid-pop cluster solely to put them up on the market on that huge realm. I don't find that market so enticing anymore, many people got into the minigame and resources are more plentiful, driving people away from the broader market, leaving niches with super-rare pets and some beginner staples.

These days, the only time I see movement on this market, at least on my home mid-pop cluster, is when new battles come out and people seek particular cageable pets that fit the new lineups. Otherwise, it's crowded for pet battling starter staples like Rapa Malefica, Idolo Anubisath, Gnomo Meccanico, Pirostellina di Ferro or Crominius, where you make little due to competition or low availability/lenghty grinds and essentially need to offer lv.25s to even get a shot at the money.

I have a fairly extensive personal collection of pets, particularly the ones that have attacks that are strong against a given family and themselves take less damage from that family, like Giovane Scorticatore, which is humanoid (less damage from critters) and has beast attacks (deal extra damage to critters), but my all-time favorite has to be Draghetto di Onyxia. It was my first level capped pet, and it still is a very solid foundation for any collection, with strong-hitting attack, a self-heal and attack that also grants one-round immunity. It was always very strong (i remember repeatedly battling pets around Wyrmrest Temple while it was still in teens, and winning) and the extra flavor from emote reaction brings back fond memories. And best part is, anyone can still get an analog pet with just a tame of a wild Prole di Onyxia, for the same pet abilities at least.